The Short Stories of LP Hartley - read by Robert Lang

From BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime, a series of creepy tales written by LP Hartley and produced by Peter Kavanagh. All shows in FLAC (lossless) and high quality Mp3.

1988-11-07 Night Fears

A nightwatchman takes on a new job, but is he prepared for anyone he might meet? 

1988-11-08 The Waits

Mr. Mariner is looking forward to Christmas Eve when there's an unexpected knock at the door. 

1988-11-09 W.S.

Novelist Walter Streeter has devoted admirers, but will he be happy to meet a new one in the flesh?

1988-11-10 Someone in the Lift

Mystery during a family's hotel stay, when only the son can see a mysterious figure when using the lift.

1988-11-11 The Price of the Absolute

A man inherits some objects, but will he be able to control the events they set in motion? 

L.P. Hartley bio:

In full Leslie Poles Hartley, (born December 30, 1895, Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, England—died December 13, 1972, London), English novelist, short-story writer, and critic whose works fuse a subtle observation of manners traditional to the English novel with an interest in the psychological nuance.

After he got his degree at the University of Oxford (1922), Hartley wrote criticism for the literary reviews and published short stories, many of them fantastic or macabre. A collection, Night Fears, appeared in 1924. His novella Simonetta Perkins (1925) was a light exercise in cosmopolitan manners, with a plot that recalls Henry James’s “international” stories. The Killing Bottle (1932) was another collection of stories. The Shrimp and the Anemone (1944), his first novel in 19 years, was the first part of a trilogy about a brother and sister, Eustace and Hilda. The first volume treats their childhood. The Sixth Heaven (1946) and Eustace and Hilda (1947) follow them in adulthood. Adept at depicting childhood, Hartley focusses the action of another of his novels, The Go-Between (1953; filmed 1971), on a 12-year-old boy who inadvertently causes a tragedy through his ignorance of the complexity of adult relations.

Relations between brothers and sisters were further explored in My Sisters’ Keeper (1970). Hartley’s most complex and fully realized novel is The Boat (1949), in which he explores the struggles of a crowd-avoiding individual in England during World War II, when group effort and identification were the norm. A volume of essays, The Novelist’s Responsibility, appeared in 1967 and The Collected Stories of L.P. Hartley in 1968.

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